Hello! I'm Pippa

Photography for new bloggers – when you don’t need a DSLR camera or lots of money!

This post is a bit of a ‘spur of the moment’ one. After receiving so many lovely comments about how my photography looks lovely and people have asked how I achieve nice looking photos, I thought I would share some points with you.

As it’s super easy, and I just use my iPhone 7 camera and a few props!

As a new blogger, I am constantly looking for inspiring photos and wondering how these bloggers get such amazing shots with the lovely blur effect, and every time their photos just looks so crisp and white.

The likelihood is, they have invested A LOT of time, money and effort into getting their photos like this, and good on them, they deserve to get a lot of recognition. However, if you are reading this and are like me, I am relatively new on the blogging scene and have to make do with what I have.

So with that in mind, I am NO expert and my photos are nowhere near perfect but I think I have made good use with what I have and haven’t spend hundreds of pounds achieving this!

Here goes a few simple points if you didn’t already know..

Background:

I genuinely used to be so blind to this and think every blogger must have lots of crisp white surfaces / marble tops in their home, and I used to look around mine trying to find white areas like the windowsills etc. but they just didn’t look the same. The thing is, this is because backgrounds are bought specifically for taking photos (which I have now realised). So I just use quite a large plain white foam board, which I picked up from Hobbycraft for like £4 I think. This allows you to place your products on the white space and decorate the photo however you wish!

Below are comparisons from my first blog photo (which wasn’t that long ago, to one I took recently)

Props:

You can see there is a massive difference in the photos above, for a number of reasons, but for this point in particular, you can see the picture is far more aesthetically pleasing because of the extras involved. In this one for examples I have included some pretty ribbon (which you can pick up from Hobbycraft) again for about 59p a metre! I’ve also include a copper R letter (from Hobbycraft – I am loving this place obviously), and some flowers in the top right corner. Flowers a such a pretty prop to add and can be so simplistic but just add some colour and ‘prettiness’ to the image. You can use real flowers or can buy fake ones from eBay for example. Other props can include the following, and a lot of them you can find lying around the house:

Sequins

Make up brushes

hair pins

notebooks and pens

cards

lipsticks

fairy lights

rings

lightbox

scarves

clothing

sweets/ biscuits

candles

Lighting:

One of the key parts to a nice crisp looking image is how bright and crisp it is. I love looking at really clean shots, I find it really pleasing. Something you probably already know is try and take photos during the day when it is naturally bright. It’s just not the same taking a photo when it’s dark and you have to use a light (unless you are going for that effect).

I plan a lot of my photos on the weekends as that’s the only time I have free when it’s light at the moment. Even when you take a photos in natural light, the likelihood is, the image will still need to be enhance with a bit of editing.

You can of course play around with the options on the phone setting and increase the highlight, brightness and maybe contrast, however I tend to use picmonkey.com which is a free photo editing site. I play around with increasing the highlight, brightness, and contrast, making sure I don’t loose too much definition of the photos

The I slightly increase the saturation, so it brings out the colours, but making sure the background stays as white. The I finish by increasing the sharpness and clarity to around 20%.

The is the before and after of a recent picture, and this was achieved, simply by playing around with the above settings on picmonkey:

It might only be a subtle difference, but I think it makes all the difference. The second picture is so much brighter and crisper than the original on the left!

Angles:

I also think the angles is quite an important one, and quite often you will see photos that are taken from above like a birds eye view which is called a flatlay. I tend to take most of my photos at this angle as you can get some lovely shots and capture a lot of products/objects.

Anyway, I have kept this quite simple as, as I said I am not an expert and I am still keen on learning more, and potentially buying a proper camera which can allow me to create the perfect blur, but I hope this helps some of you who may just be starting out and are wondering how to do things cheaply and easily.

such handy tips, I’ve been meaning to pick something up for my backgrounds for so long! definitely need to get something. I only use my iPhone for pictures too, and props which are laying around the house – I don’t really have a lot of spare money especially with the time of year! but this post is great 🙂

I have bookmarked this post! Honestly – this is one of the most helpful posts I have seen to date on this kind of thing 🙂 I always feel disheartened about not having a great camera so I hardly ever post pictures unless it’s a day out or something. This is great – thank you! 🙂 xxx

I’m so glad to have have helped! I do too, but honestly you can achieve some really great things without a good camera and lighting equipment, I think it’s all in the creativity of the photo! You can do it, if I can, anyone can xx